


beneath closed eyelids I do not cease to guard this

by lurknomoar



Category: A Study in Emerald - Neil Gaiman
Genre: Canon-Typical Behavior, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-typical lovecraftian monstrosity mention, Including brief mention of drug use, M/M, Revolutionaries In Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-24 15:48:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21820471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurknomoar/pseuds/lurknomoar
Summary: It is hard to imagine a different world.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 14
Kudos: 48
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	beneath closed eyelids I do not cease to guard this

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KillClaudio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KillClaudio/gifts).



> I hope this little Watson character study is to your liking.

We sleep during the day, with the curtains closed against the hostile glare of the midday sun. In our work, we have become like those we work against: distrustful, secretive, and mostly nocturnal. It has been days since I have even seen sunlight, and it has been weeks since I ventured out onto the street without the cover of both night and a thick rolling fog. How long has it been since I walked under the sun without fear of ambush, fear of recognition? Years, surely. Slow, creeping, seeping years. Years spent hiding and running, years spent laying low in damp basements and unsafe safe houses, reading by the light of a single candle and sleeping fitfully at odd hours, eating sparse cold meals and traveling in the coal cars of trains for fear of discovery if we bought even a third-class ticket. A few month at a time spent back on the fringes of society, attempting to cut a respectable figure in our threadbare frock coats, grandstanding for the theatrical public, giving false names when anyone asks and hoping people will stop asking. Lying whenever I run into someone who had known me in my old life, back when I had been a brave soldier, a good doctor, a law-abiding citizen. I have learned to swallow the shame and sound convincing when I say that I do not know them, and I try to soothe the ache of isolation by reminding myself that it is for them too that we fight. But still I feel ashamed on days like that, not ashamed of the bloody work we do, but shamed indeed by the loss of my old name, of having become a liar and blackguard out of necessity. Afterwards, I am always glad to melt back into anonymity, to go back to hiding in the rookeries, sleeping in a drafty attic above a washerwoman’s little rented apartment, where the wind runs through my bones, but at least I am called by my own name. It is a hard life, and it does not get easier. My old wound aches every day where the rebel bullets turned hale flesh into a twisted mass of scars, and while laudanum tends to ease the pain, I force myself to dole out small doses that hardly take the edge off. I know that if I allow myself a complete relief from fear and pain, if I consent to drift in those sweet crimson dreams, whatever wakes up might not entirely be me, that is if I wake up at all.

I have not been a restorationist for long. Nobody is a restorationist for long, I think: soon we break, or we are broken, made an example of. But for that brief while beforehand, we get to be the only free men and women on this godbewildered island. I would not have found out that such a people even existed, had I not met my friend. He had lain in one of the beds at St Bart's, where I had briefly worked after my discharge from the army: a whipcord thin man, shivering so hard his teeth chattered, his skin parchment-pale, his hair and his ragged linen shirt drenched with sweat. The other doctors hardly dared approach him, not wanting to contract what was almost certainly a severe case of typhoid fever. I, not having much regard for my health, and bored to the point of distraction, did approach the patient, and laying my hand on his high forehead, noted that he was not feverish at all. The high spots of colour on his cheek smudged when I touched them. Greasepaint. He was pretending to be ill for some reason, almost certainly using the hospital to escape some manner of persecution, and I should have had him thrown out immediately. But at that moment, he grabbed my hand, trained his keen dark eyes on me, and asked if it was a brother or a father that I had lost to our rulers’ appetite. I had never told another living soul about what had happened to Harry, and yet this stranger knew (later on he explained his deduction, the marks on my pocket watch, the scars on my fingers.) Not only did he know, he cared. And that was enough to keep me silent about his deception, to betray my oath as a doctor, my oath as a soldier, as a citizen, and to follow him into the perils of the long hunt.

The hunt is long, and I suspect it will not be over in our lifetime. I am fiercely proud of our kills, of the credulous fools my friend leads to the slaughter by playing on their vanity, their greed, their insatiable appetite for the pain of others. I am proud of the limbs I have hacked off, the ribcages I have pried open, the viscous green blood I have spilled. But still, the queen sits on her throne, the country bows its head to the crown, and for all the violent mayhem we sow, nothing changes. On sleepless middays such as this, doubt creeps in. I do not doubt the righteousness of our cause, but I do fear for its future. In fact I am not always sure why I keep going. It is only the fearless, unshakable faith of my friend that keeps me afloat, since even when I trust nothing else, not even my own mind, I still find myself trusting him. And yet I often wonder if I am making the right choice when I choose to remain at his side.

Sometimes, when I wake up in the late afternoon, with the watery sunlight already failing, and a night’s work looming up ahead, I wonder why he did not choose someone else as his companion. Whoever he chose would be forever torn from the society of his fellow men, bound to a life in the shadows, he’d be marked for death the way I am. Yet there are any number of men in England carrying in their heart a secret hurt they dare not speak of, and an even more secret rage that they do not yet know is a weapon. There are any number of men who would follow him, and many already do. And he gives them advice, he gives them orders whenever they require it, but not one of them has his confidence as I do, and it is hard to say why. While I have dedicated my life to serving the cause and serving my friend, I am not sure either gets much use out of a life such as mine. I know I cannot stalk the streets of London alongside him, the greatest hunter of our age. I am not a well man, and when his aim is speed instead of stealth, my unsteady gait would only slow him down. Even in thought, I cannot match the brisk pace of his ingenuity, for he thinks and plans faster than anyone I have ever met. I cannot act or lie or invent wonderfully credible falsehoods the way he can, twisting the twisted minds of our tyrants around a cleverly-worded hint, a promise, a delicious morsel placed in the jaws of the trap. My lies are pretty enough if I have the time to mull them over and put them on paper, but they are insubstantial little deceptions, sufficient to delight those who do not know better, abhorrent to those who watch with their eyes open. My friend does not like my fanciful wordplay all that much, and neither do I. All I have ever written is cheaper than a single word out of his mouth.

I am good with a pen, but not exceptional. He could find someone else to write for him, to keep his little theatre troupe afloat. He could find someone else to accompany him on his hunts, someone who matches him stride for stride. My friend could find another man to tend to his wounds, to clean the foul poison from his cuts and sew them up as gently as possible. I do admit I am peerless when it comes to butchering royalty. I have had plentiful practice, and by now I wield my scalpels and bonesaw like an artist, I can tear limb from hadopelagic limb, I can snap every single sinew, unspool every single nerve, severing the connections between body and mind so that not even the hardiest of the creatures can ever survive what we have done to them. I have learned to lay out the remains in a way that inspires dread in the dreadful. But I’m not the only doctor in England who has decided that their task is to do harm to those who would do harm to others first. Another could surely learn that I have learned.

My friend could find another companion, another writer, another healer, another butcher, and he could easily find another lover if he wished. Indeed we are lovers, although not very many people know this. Few people know what he is to me, and still their number is higher than the number of those who know both our real names. Here, in the smoky nighttime world, in the seediest, scummiest parts of London, when people spot two gentlemen who have seen better times, staggering down the street, nervously clutching one another, they assume they already know why we are hiding from the eyes of the law, and we never tell them they have less than half of the truth. Our real crime is rebellion, our real sin is treason, our purpose is insurrection, and when we break the law on our own accounts, that is a mere afterthought. I have been his lover for years now, held him through more nights than I can count, kissing his thin severe mouth, his pale arching neck, his quivering eyelids. I love him, and when I hold him in my arms I consider myself the richest man on Earth, but so would every invert in London who has eyes in his head. He could take his pleasure and his respite with someone else. It is not my body, broken and worn, or my heart, tired and terrified, that chain him to me and make him mine.

He is mine because he, even he has his own doubts. He is braver than I am, and wiser, and more resolute. He would gladly give his life for the cause, a thousand times over, and I rather think he would gladly give mine. But to live life consumed by a singular purpose, to empty his mind of anything that will not serve him in his time of need, leaves him vulnerable to the blackest, foulest moods. Sometimes he leaves to get into a bare-knuckle fight and comes back bruised, deliriously glad that the blood in his mouth, the blood on his shirt is for once red. Sometimes he partakes of cocaine, spends a few hours completely immobile but thinking at the speed of a lightning’s branching strike. Sometimes, he plays the violin, and he drags himself back to a semblance of control on the back of weightlessly soaring melodies. But sometimes, none of that seems to do him an ounce of good, and he forgets that the hunt, the revenge, the years of fearful drudgery actually has a purpose, and begins to sink in the quagmire of hopeless, fruitless rage. I understand that he has spent his whole life fighting with every fiber of his being, and he has no power left over to remember why he fights. His heart beats only to propel him forward, and it had forgotten what it feels like to hope. He needs someone to remember it for him, to imagine what he has long burnt out of himself, to see what he cannot see even if he closes his eyes.

At times like that, on the worst days, when the thread of the story threatens to slip away from him, on a coach ride in the dead of the night or in the noontime spent hiding in another damp basement room, he grabs my hand, tight enough to jar bone against bone and says… tell me the story. You know which one. Tell me. And I tell him of the world that he himself had unwittingly shown me. The one where we’re free. A world without crowns, a world without thrones. There, we haven’t won, because the war did not even need to be fought, and our biggest concern is what new adventure to get into, what new discovery to make. Nobody is taken, nobody is devoured. In that other world, the Thames runs through London with a peaceful ebb and flow, the dark waters do not envelop the houses of the devout and the salt mist is not threading its mad murmurings into Londoners’ daily life, which is no longer a horrifying quest to obey overlords who do not even particularly wish for our obedience more than they wish for our fear. It may still be miserable, that other London, it may be filled to the brim with filth and crime but all of it is human, all of it ours, the London where all of the hurt is done by people to people, and where all the people who have done harm can one day be brought to justice, if pursued with wits and persistence. And there, Sherlock Holmes need not hide his name, and policemen grudgingly salute him on the street instead of ignoring him on a good day and raising the alarm on a really bad one. There, John Watson still gets to practice medicine, to treat sprained ankles and common colds in the comfort of a real practice, instead of stitching up jagged cuts by the light of a single petroleum lamp. And he gets to write. There, John Watson can write, and publish, and and sign his own name, there he gets to write what he believes, what he so naively and foolhardily still believes about the value of truth and the beauty of the human spirit. And Holmes, maybe he can visit a concert hall again, as he could not for long, long years, he can sit in his own box listening to Sarasate's caprices, melting into the music with his eyes closed.

‘There is a world,’ I tell him, holding his hand tight and not letting go, putting all my faith, all my love in the words he needs to hear from me. ‘There is a world, you must believe me, there is a world where you and I get to walk down Baker street arm in arm, without a care in our hearts, and the moon shines down on us, bright and pale like a freshly minted silver shilling.’

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from the Ted Hughes' translation of the János Pilinszky poem Apocrypha, about WW2 and the apocalypse and abandonment by god, and trying to maintain some sort of hope or belief or strength in the face of horror. You can read it here:
> 
> https://andrewhammel.blog/2009/05/29/janos-pilinszkyapocrypha-1-everything-will-be-forsaken-then-the-silence-of-the-heavens-will-be-set-apartand-forever-apar/


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